As the name suggests, App Store Optimization (ASO) is the practice of optimizing your app’s visibility in the app stores. Like in real life, visibility is not just about standing out, it’s also about making sure people like what they see.

ASO is essentially a combination of getting more people to discover your app (through browsing the app store) and converting app page visitors (no matter how they found you) into installers and then loyal customers later on.

The Pillars of ASO

The two equally important pillars of ASO are:

Optimizing Keywords – Helps you achieve more organic growth through better discoverability in the app stores.

Optimizing Keywords

Optimizing your app store keywords is an excellent way to increase your app’s discoverability in app store search results. Essentially, the goal is to use keywords that are relevant to your business and will trigger platforms to show your app to users searching for the corresponding terms.

There are many other factors that go into keyword rankings, including keyword relevancy (the number of phrases that a keyword forms) and consistency across your title, app description and user reviews. By drawing correlations between keywords used by different apps, chart rankings and estimated number of downloads, keyword analysis tools attempt to “reverse engineer” app store algorithms and help you find the keywords that will improve your visibility in app store search. This is important, but increasing the number of visits to your page alone is not sufficient. It’s more essential to optimize for the number of quality downloads on your app store page.

Increasing Install Conversions with App Store Optimization

Now that you’re getting more organic traffic to your app store page by optimizing keywords, the challenge is to find the right creatives and messaging that will convince users to actually download your app. Moreover, all of your paid traffic goes directly from the ad to your app store page, where your goal is simple – get higher conversions.

App Store Testing is the only data driven approach to increase your conversion rate. By testing multiple variations of your app store page with different icons, screenshots and videos, you can analyze the data collected regarding how visitors behave on your page.

By testing and finding the optimal landing page, not only will you achieve additional free organic installs, but you will also decrease install costs in your paid acquisition efforts.

What is more important? And what should I start with? Check out these 10 Killer Marketing Tips to get a sense of where to start.

The reality is that at the end of the day, you need to get more awareness and more downloads to grow your app business. This makes both pillars of ASO key aspects of your mobile marketing strategy.